National Biodigester Conference
Esther Altorfer and Cedrick Todwell, Kenya Country Director and Commercial Director respectively, participated on August 21 and 22 in the 2019 National Biodigester Conference and Exhibition hosted by the Kenya Biogas Program at Pride Inn Hotel, Westlands.
Esther and Cedrick were part of two panels building the case around biogas and financing platforms. This was an outstanding opportunity to share the stage with our financial partners Juhudi Kilimo and Equity Bank, resulting in reassuring the partnership with Equity Bank by strengthening co-branding and sales-marketing implementation. Also, the representatives of Equity Bank announced their willingness to participate in the Wigan project by funding three large scale farmers.
Our Kenyan Commercial Director, Cedrick Todwell participated in the second panel that was made up of competitors and researchers in the private sector.
Finally, Sistema.bio stood out among competitors thanks to our stall set-up, where we displayed a real biodigester! This experience helped our team close three sales for Meru.
Field trip with potential partners
On August 19, we received two potential partners from Veolia Foundation and Bix Capital. Our Global Technical Manager, Max Affre, led them on a field trip to meet our Sistema.bio clients in-person. This was a great opportunity to advocate for a potential sanitation partnership and impact bond.
Moving forward on bioslurry!
Edd Colbert, an expert Agroecologist from Lyon University, finished his six-week consultancy in Kenya by providing a complete bioslurry training. Edd created a detailed bioslurry manual, in which he shares the best practices for the application of organic fertilizer for the most common plants in Kenya, Latin America, and India.
In addition, the Kenyan sales team held a creative workshop on August 21. One of the main objectives of this activity was to incorporate the benefits of our powerful bioslurry in our sales pitch. This helped us to provide full training materials to our technical team and to consolidate our knowledge.
Releasing new sales structure and incentives
The Kenyan team is on track to accomplish Sistema.bio’s 2019 sales goals! To ensure this, we recently launched a new sales structure that incorporates new incentives for our sales team; including loan collection incentives, bonus, and more support from airtime to marketing and branding. This is a big step to achieve our 2019 sales goals and motivate our sales team.
Testing billboards for more sales
We are incorporating BTL advertisements to get to more people. We are testing two billboards in Kericho and Meru. This initiative began in mid-August and we have already sold one Sistema 30 digester thanks to this technique. We aim to generate more sales and brand visibility with this.
